Calling all Canadians: Aurora Award nominations–the top Canadian prize in speculative fiction–are now open (until May 26), and if you’d like to support me then I hope you’ll consider nominating “The Waxing Disquiet” from me and co-author Tony Pi, eligible for Best Short Fiction. You can read it here for free until nominations close.

And if you’re not Canadian, well, feel free to read it anyway! Tony and I are quite proud of our beeswax-and-candle-punk tale 🙂

Thanks to my co-author Tony Pi for the head’s-up about the first review of our story “The Waxing Disquiet,” which appeared last month in Deep Magic.

The Waxing Quiet, by Tony Pi & Stephen Kotowych in Deep Magic. “He retreated to the calculation antechamber, where the tallylooms worked unceasingly. Click-clack went the wooden hooks, tying knots in the coarse hemp twine, the knot-history of their answers.” Fate and faith are at the center of this story, set in a society where a complex loom is used to determine which decisions are the right ones: for the society as a whole, and for individuals. The loom itself is a breathtaking piece of imagined technology, and I love the way the organization of the society uses concepts and terminology from bees and bee-keeping. A uniquely imagined world, and I’ll be thinking about that loom for a while…

Thanks to Maria Haskins for the shout-out–we’re glad she liked the story!

Very pleased to announce that “The Waxing Disquiet”, a collaboration with Tony Pi, has sold to Deep Magic. It should appear in that magazine’s June issue.

This is the first collaboration for Tony and I, though we’ve known each other for more than ten years, including belonging to The Stop-Watch Gang writer’s group.

“The Waxing Disquiet” is set in a low-metal civilization built around hive-pyramids, bee-keeping, and the candle-and-waterworks-powered tallyloom computers that direct and order the society.

It was a lot of fun writing collaboratively with Tony. We both really loved this world, and I hope its one we can return to again soon.

And as it happens, Tony was able to arrange for a class of University of Toronto mechanical engineers to use the tallyloom idea as the basis for their year-end projects. Several teams actually built tallying machines that used only wood, water, wax, and weights to operate. It was very cool to see something you wrote about come to life like that!

A pair of NASA space probes have detected an artificial bubble around Earth that forms when radio communications from the ground interact with high-energy radiation particles in space, the agency announced this week. The bubble forms a protective barrier around Earth, shielding the planet from potentially dangerous space weather, like solar flares and other ejections from the sun.

This bubble is caused by human use of very-low frequency (VLF) radio waves. The observations suggest that the VLF waves can push radiation particles away, since the Van Allen belts (naturally occurring bands of charged particles that surround the Earth) are much further from Earth now than in the 1960s, when we sent fewer VLF transmissions.

I was supposed to keep it hush-hush for a while, but I think I’m allowed to say now that I’ve sold another story. I’m very pleased that my story ‘The Murmur of Its Name’ will be published in Flame Tree Press’s Supernatural Horror anthology later this summer. From all accounts, Flame Tree’s books are gorgeous so I’m looking forward to my copy!

‘The Murmur of Its Name’ takes place (I think?) in the same world as my story ‘There Followed the Wind’ from my collection, SEVEN AGAINST TOMORROW.

I say ‘I think’ because this new story is…a bit dark for me. Usually I’m not one for horror, but this one just sort of came out that way. It’s also (again, unusually for me) what might be called a “swords and sanity” story, pondering what the invasion of a quasi-Japan would have been like if the Mongols and their Great Khan were actually in service of something…old.

So, not 100% whether it fits in with the world and events of ‘Wind’, but I have more ideas for this quasi-Japan and its samurai so I guess I’ll find out at some point…